Notify When Available Tracks the Availability of Other Users

Usually, the Teams developers can be criticized for informing customers about new features a long time in advance of actual availability. In a change to normal practice, Microsoft published message center notification MC797120 about the Notify when available feature for the new Teams client on May 30 and observed that they had been rolling out the feature to targeted release tenants since mid-May. General release tenants should see the feature showing up any date now because worldwide general deployment is scheduled to complete in early June.

Possibly the reason why Microsoft went ahead and released Notify when available feature without any warning is that this functionality exists in the old Teams client but not in the new 2.1 client (see “Features that are changing in the new Teams”). Users had complained about the loss of the feature (here’s an example of one of many questions on the topic from the Microsoft Answers forum). Releasing Notify when available removes one more thing off the “Make Teams 2.1 complete” list. I hope Microsoft moves on to restore the save messages option soon.

What Notify When Available Does

Notify when available is a mechanism to tell Teams that you’re interested in knowing when the presence status for another user changes to available. The kind of scenario that this feature is useful in is when you know that someone is going to be heavily committed to other tasks during a day, but you need to speak to them for a moment.

Taking out a subscription on their presence status makes Teams aware that you want to know when the person changes their presence to available. When that happens, Teams sends a notification that the person is now available and it’s up to you to reach out and contact them.

Using Notify When Available

The easiest way to know when someone is available is to find the person you want to communicate with in your chat list (not in a popped-out chat window). Perhaps they’re available now, in which case you can connect, or it will be like the situation shown in Figure 1 where Sean Landy is busy. To create the subscription, select Notify when available from the […] menu.

Once a subscription is in place, you’ll continue to receive a notification (Figure 2) each time the user changes their presence status to available.

Because Teams monitors the presence status for the account, the change to “Available” is detected immediately, and the notification arrives soon afterward. Changes in presence to other states like Busy, Appear offline, etc. do not generate a notification.

Disabling Notifications

Although it’s possible to leave a subscription in place permanently and continue to receive notifications when someone is available, most people only need to be notified once or twice. To remove a subscription, open the […] menu for the user and select Turn off notifications.

To view all subscriptions currently active, go to the People section in Notifications settings in the Teams Settings app (Figure 2). You can now turn off whichever subscription you’re no longer interested in contacting or add subscriptions for some new people.

To stop receiving notifications, you can turn them off in your app settings (#2 above).

For the record, here’s the Microsoft support article for the Notify when available feature.

Transitions are Hard

There’s no doubt that transitions are hard, especially for client software that’s packed full of features accumulated over years. In that light, Microsoft has done a reasonable job of replaced the original Teams client with Teams 2.1. Certainly, they’re in a place that the new Outlook for Windows developers would like to be, a larger installed base transitioned and most people happy. I wonder will the situation be the same when Microsoft eventually retires Outlook classic in 2029?

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Better Captioning and Speedier Exchange Presence Updates

It’s Friday, so we can round off the week by noting a couple of changes in Teams that might have passed you by.

Speaker Names and Live Captions

First, Speaker Attribution in Live Captions (MC219651, July 31) has arrived in my tenant. The roll-out of the feature started in mid-August and is supposed to finish by the end of the month. Live captions have been available for Teams meetings for about a year (for a long time, the feature was labelled as a preview and it’s still only available in US English).

Up to now, the text generated through speech recognition appeared at the bottom of the screen in a continuous stream and you didn’t know who said what. The equivalent feature in Google Meet shows a speaker’s photo and name beside their words. Now, as part of the new meeting experience, speaker attribution means that Teams live captions show the speaker’s name (Figure 1).

The accuracy of the captions generated by Teams is sometimes challenged by speaker mumbling, accent, or poor enunciation, but most of the time it’s reasonable and is certainly helpful to those who need help following what’s going on in meetings. Adding the speaker name improves accessibility, so it’s a good thing.

Improvements in Exchange <-> Teams Connections

Teams and Exchange share calendars and other information about users, like out of office notifications, which are set in Exchange and appear in the Teams user profile card. Many have noted that sometimes Teams doesn’t display updates made in Exchange as quickly as people would like and some recent changes are designed to help.

When users update their out of office notification with a client like Outlook, the information is written to their mailbox and notified to Teams. The new status is shown in the user’s profile card (Figure 2). My testing proved that a change to an out of office notification is almost immediately available in Teams if the user is signed into Teams. If not, the update is applied the next time the user signs in.

When an out of office notification is in place for a user in Exchange, Teams displays a tip in chats (Figure 3) and in channel conversations (when the user is @ mentioned).

Another change that’s been made is to speed up presence updates using the Graph presence subscription API. For example, when someone’s in a meeting, the API makes Teams quicker to detect that they are busy so that their status can be updated (Figure 4). The update seems to happen a minute or so after the scheduled start of the meeting in the user’s calendar, which is acceptable. Your mileage might vary.

Fit and Finish

Everyone likes the big new features, like Together Mode (which I’m still not sure if I like). But often the usability of software is dictated by the fit and finish of features. In other words, how well things work at a detailed level. The changes described here are examples of updates that improve the fit and finish of Teams.

Here’s my quick video review of the Plenom Busylight. It’s a small LED light that plugs into a USB port on your computer and changes color to reflect your presence status in Teams, Skype, Zoom, Jabber, or several other UC clients.

The executive summary: great device, well worth US$50 or so to help communicate your presence status to the partners, spouses, small children, and passers-by who may be in, around, or near your working-under-quarantine location.

Now, a couple of production notes. I wanted to record the video using my Logitech desktop webcam. It’s a C920, by no means the latest and greatest, but I didn’t want to fool around with finding a mount or tripod for my iPhone. My first thought was to use TechSmith’s Camtasia because it’s usually my go-to Windows tool for video work. I didn’t have it installed, though, so a little rummaging around led me to Logitech Capture, a surprisingly nice free utility that allows you to capture video from Logitech desktop webcams. It includes basic composition and exposure controls and the ability to simultaneously record with two cameras (which I didn’t test). For free, I was delighted with it; it did exactly what I wanted done with a very small learning curve. Pancake the cat, on the other hand, remains undecided.

Writing about a USB light doesn’t seem like the kind of thing serious book publishing people like the Office 365 for IT Pros team should be doing. But we have a lighthearted side too…